Cultural Sociology 2024-2025 Readings Summary

An overview of the readings for Cultural Sociology 2024-2025

[WK1] “Culture in Classical Social Theory” (Smith, Philip & Riley)

An introduction to sociologist thinkers: Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, Nietzsche, and DuBois.

[WK1] “The Decolonial Challenge to Sociology” (Meghji, 2021)

Standpoint theory, Eurocentrism, Orientalism, Bifurcation, and Southern Standpoint

[WK1] “Black Feminist Epistemology” (Collins, 1990)

Black Feminist Epistemology, Methodologies, and Paradigms; Standpoint Theory

[WK2] “Artistic Fields” (Alexander, 2020)

Pierre Bourdieu’s Artistic Fields (Autonomous and Heteronomous)

[WK2] “The Social Reproduction of Inequality” (Dillon, 2009)

Bourdieu; Economic, Cultural, and Social Capital; Social Stratification; Class Inequality

[WK2] “The genesis, structure and transformation of the contemporary Chinese cinematic field” (Nakajima, 2016)

Chinese cinematic field and its changes under globalization with the lens of Bourdieu

[WK3] “Chapter 3: Discourse” (Mills, 2003)

On Foucault’s power and discourse: 3 external, 4 internal maintenance of power.

[WK3] “Chapter 7: The Poststructural Turn” (Smith and Riley, 2009)

Introduction to post-structuralism and the death of the subject. Foucault’s ideas of discourse and power.

[WK3] “Fashionable Resistance: Queer “Fa(t)shion” Blogging as Counterdiscourse” (Connell, 2013)

Foucauldian counterdiscourse in fa(t)shion.

[WK4] “The Real Me” (Proctor, 2004)

Introduction to Hall’s ideas on new ethnicities, politics of identity [differerence, self-reflexivity, contingency], post-colonialism, and multiculturalism.

[WK4] “New Ethnicities” (Hall, 2021)

The First Moment (Traditional Identity Politics) and the Second Moment (Politics of Identity)

[WK4] "Misogynoir in women’s sport media: race, nation, and diaspora in the representation of Naomi Osaka" (Razack & Joseph, 2020)

Misogynoir and colorism in women’s sports media and (mis)representations of jaspora through Naomi Osaka

[WK5] “Introduction: New Curves in the Emotional Turn” (Gould, 2009)

Feelings, Affect, Affective States, Emotions, Emotives, Emotional Habitus. How these all factor into political movements.

[WK5] “Chapter 2: A Shifting Emotional Habitus and the Emergence of the Direct-action AIDS movement” (Gould, 2009)

Bowers vs. Hardwick, realization that the state was systematically homophobic, rise of activism, birth of ACT UP.

[WK5] “An Emotional Economy of Mundane Objects” (Kuruoğlu & Ger, 2014)

Emotionality and Materiality, Emotional/Affective Economies, Consumption Communities. Discusses Kurdish resistance through the recording, playing, hiding, and distributing of Kurdish music through cassette tapes.